


Come lay your bones on the alabaster stones

by cooperjones2020



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, brotp: Alice Cooper and Jughead Jones, intergenerational poverty, late night bonding sesh, so i don't really know how to tag it, the system is broken, this is neither fluff nor angst nor smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 11:34:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11758992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cooperjones2020/pseuds/cooperjones2020
Summary: A second one-shot inspired by the 1x13 deleted scene. Alice and Jughead have a late night heart-to-heart.(Betty's only a minor character but the whole premise rests on their relationship so I'm tagging it Bughead anyway)





	Come lay your bones on the alabaster stones

It takes a week before he’s comfortable enough in the Cooper house to wander around without Betty, which makes it awkward in the moments he’s home and she isn’t. He winds up penned in whatever room he’s in when someone comes in. Sometimes, it’s his room which is nice because he basically has the run of the basement and there’s a TV down there, but which also makes him feel guilty, like he should be trying harder to assimilate with the Coopers as a unit. But if Jughead’s in the kitchen or the living room, he winds up stuck in that room, trying his hardest to make small talk and seem normal. Once, he spent forty-five minutes talking to Hal about car engines. He knows nothing about car engines. He had to check with Betty later to make sure he hadn’t said anything stupid.

He’s getting over that though, slowly but surely, his curiosity overtaking his social awkwardness. Because he’s discovered that he’s the only one ever awake at 2 am, and so it’s prime snooping time. He discovered it by accident, one night coming out of his writing trance dying of thirst. He filled a glass from the chute in the refrigerator door and wandered the ground floor in the dark, peering into picture frames. The wall below the stairs is a visual timeline of Polly and Betty, from photos of them in their hospital blankets right down to a photo of Polly at prom last year and one of Betty with Toni Morrison’s arm around her.

Now it’s become a bit of a nightly ritual. He’s moved on from picture frames to picture albums. Mundane residua that exist as testament to the Coopers’ deep love for one other. He knows his father loves him. But their life has never encompassed either the leisure time or the inclination for an activity such as scrapbooking.

Tonight he eases his way up the stairs, avoiding the creak he’s discovered in the second step from the top. He’s had a breakthrough on how to wrap up a dangling plot thread, and is ready to sleep knowing he’s earned the night’s rest. But not before he makes it through “Polly and Betty 2011-2012.”

At first, he doesn’t notice the under cabinet lights are on in the kitchen, because at least one usually is. A courtesy night light for any late night prowlers, ie, him. But tonight they’re all on, and Alice is sitting at the table, wrapped up in an oversized sweater, both hands around a steaming mug of tea. He stops in the doorway.

“Jughead, what are you doing up? Couldn’t sleep?”

“I’m always up now, Mrs. C.” He cups the back of his neck with his hand and ruffles his hair. “I actually haven’t been to bed yet.”

“You’re a night owl. And you’ve been up night after night alone?”

“I don’t mind. Betty’s tried to stay up with me a few times, but she always falls asleep.”

Alice’s face moves as ifshe’s smiling, her eyes crinkle warmly, though her lips stay motionless. “I suppose we’ll all have to make some adjustments. That will be good for us.”

He gets his water and takes a seat across from her at the table. “Listen, Mrs. Cooper. I just want to thank you again. I don’t know how to tell you how much I appreciate your and Mr. Cooper’s letting me stay with you.”

“Jughead, I’ve told you, if you’re going to be living here, I want you to call me Alice.” She pauses to take a sip of her tea. “Are you settling in alright?”

“Yeah, it’s nice.” It is, but he can’t quite articulate to Alice what he means by that. He’s still adjusting to things in the Cooper household. They’re quieter than he’s used to. People move more softly. They say please and thank you and they offer to refill each others’ drinks when they go into the kitchen. He’s not suffering from any delusions, he knows they’re all crazy, even him, but still it’s nice.

There’s a soothing regularity to being warm when he falls asleep and when he wakes up, to knowing where his next meal is coming from and that all the USDA-mandated food groups will be covered. He loves Archie and Fred, they’re his family, but he doesn’t think it ever occurred to either of them that an air mattress on a cold wooden floor doesn’t the warmest of beds make. Especially in November in an old house. Plus, with a few more consecutive meals of frozen pizza, he’s pretty sure he’d have gotten scurvy. Especially because the Andrews men always opt for ‘Meatzza.’ And it’s been a long time since FP was capable of getting a family dinner on the table.

He feels guilty even having these thoughts. But Betty’s stopped brushing his under eye bags with her fingers the way she’d taken to in the last few weeks when she got so preoccupied worrying about him she stopped being self conscious. So yeah, it’s nice.

“What are you drinking? It smells good.”

Alice’s fingers tighten on the mug. “Oh, an herbal tea blend I use sometimes when I’m having trouble sleeping. Mostly chamomile, but it’s got some other herbs in it. Lemon balm, valerian root, catnip. I can make you a cup.” It’s a sentence but her intonation tells him she means it as a question.

He doesn’t know how to say no, he doesn’t drink tea, especially not tea with  _catnip_  in it, so he says, “Sure.” Apparently he doesn’t know how to talk to Alice Cooper at all. The Coopers are middle class in a way even the Andrews aren’t, in a way that goes beyond their gross yearly income. He’s known Betty since they were four and yet he hadn’t expected catnip tea and kale salads and the whole set of all-natural shower and shave products that had been waiting for him in the bathroom on the day he moved in. He’s been dying for days to make a joke about how bougie they all are. But of Archie and Betty, only Betty would get it, and he doesn’t want to give her another thing to feel self-conscious about. He knows she already worries about the class differential between them, that she still feels guilty about not knowing he was homeless.

Alice bustles around the darkened kitchen, switching on the electric kettle, scooping what to Jughead look like dried spices into a little metal ball she sets in a mug and then in front of him. Are tea bags not good enough for these people?

When she pours the water in, the smell, now much closer to his face, is overwhelmingly floral. Almost like perfume. But he lifts the mug and inhales deeply anyway, thankful that for the moment it’s still too hot to drink.

“Betty said you used to work at the Twilight.”

“Yeah, til it closed.”

She nods, as if Jughead, who had been the only one in the sophomore class with a paying job, is normal. “I want you to focus on school. And on being a teenager. But I’m sure it must be hard to lose that extra bit of autonomy that money can give. So if you wanted to find another job, for after school a couple nights a week, Hal and I could help.”

He doesn’t want to seem too eager, so he stares at the snow falling in the window behind her before answering, “That’d be great.”

“Not at the  _Register_ , though. You and Betty need at least one place you’re not together. Everyone needs somewhere to escape to. That took me five years of marriage to learn and I’m offering it to you for free.” Alice emphasizes her words of wisdom by pointing at him. “And no garages either.” Then she looks at him like he’s supposed to know what that means. Surely she knows Betty’s the one who belongs in a garage.

Then, horror of horrors, his stomach rumbles. Loudly. Alice smirks.

“How about some lasagna to go with that tea?”

“I never turn down food.”

“No, I don’t suppose you do.” Jughead’s coasted on his reputation as a human garbage disposal for many years. It’s assumed that he’ll want seconds, that he’ll finish other people’s leftovers. Betty has made more than one comment about his unfair-teenage-boy metabolism. But a prickle on the back of Jughead’s neck tells him that’s not what Alice means. She pops a large square of lasagna in the microwave then comes back to face him, a new glint in her eyes.

“I remember what it feels like to go to bed hungry.” She doesn’t direct it  _to_ him necessarily, it’s not accusatory. But almost, conspiratorial? As if she’s charting out neutral waters where they can meet.

“I grew up in Sunnyside, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that, Mrs. C—” She raises an eyebrow at him. “Alice. I didn’t know that, Alice.”

Her smile is warm. “I did. Until I was 17 and moved in with an aunt who’d gotten out and had an apartment over the hair salon on Fifth. It was almost too late though. They didn’t let girls in the gang officially then, but I was around enough to get into some stuff I had no business being a part of.”

Jughead chokes on his catnip tea. “ _You_  were a Southside Serpent?”

“Mhm. I’m surprised your dad didn’t mention it when you and Betty started dating. Every day I expected her to come home and throw it in my face.”

He’s not sure how to respond to that so he waits while she retrieves his plate from the microwave, setting it in front of him with a fork and a folded napkin.

“But you’re not a Serpent now?”

“Of course not. I put enough distance between us and I didn’t know anything really dangerous so eventually they let me go. Plus I started dating Hal that summer and things got serious between us pretty fast. And his dad was the mayor, so they couldn’t get too close to me anyway.”

To say Jughead is stunned would be an understatement. Alice Cooper, pastel spokeswoman for suburban perfection, grew up in a trailer park and ran with a gang as a teenager — ran with his  _father’s_ gang. It’s almost like she’s trying to tell him they’re the same. He wonders, uncomfortably, if they are. And it gives a new shade of meaning to the dream he’d had once of Betty in a poodle skirt and Archie with a knife in his back. He’ll have to untangle the resonance of that one later.

But now she’s revealed something of herself and, in the calculus of interpersonal relationships, Jughead knows it’s his turn. “I was surprised when you guys offered to let me live here. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m really grateful. But, to be honest with you, I didn’t think Mr. Cooper liked me all that much.”

Alice sighs. “Hal is a good man. He’s a good father. But he has the privilege of seeing the world as black and white in a way that you and I can’t.” She looks up from her mug of tea and meets Jughead’s eyes. “He’s always been that way. So clear about right and wrong. I’ve tried for most of our lives to mimic that. I was so sure he was right.” She trails off for a moment and the silence settles like a blanket of snow. “All I’ve ever wanted was to do what’s best for my children, all my children. And I’ve made a lot of mistakes in pursuit of that. Some of them irreparable. But some…I have a lot to atone for.”

Jughead swallows. She seems to need to speak, and he wants to hold that door open for her. “I don’t know about Polly, but Betty does knows that. She knows how much you love her. You’re a good person too.”

She nods, but looks as if she’s not really paying attention.

“Good people in bad circumstances still do bad things.” It’s a truth Jughead is intimately acquainted with, and, yet, in Alice’s mouth the words seem heavier, more personal even. Maybe because he knows about her son. Maybe because he knows that, like the hand of God, she’s plucked him off his father’s path and deposited him on her own.

“You’re here because Betty loves you and because you’re a good kid. You deserve better than what you’ve been given. It’s hard, almost impossible to climb out of that hole. Someone gave me a hand once. Now I’m passing on the favor.” She twists her empty mug from hand to hand. “Your dad’s always meant well, always done his best in his own way. He doesn’t deserve what’s happening to him. If the situation was reversed, I like to think he’d do the same for my daughters.”

“You talk like you know him.”

“We were close, once. People don’t change that much.”

Jughead thinks about the baby Serpents he’d met at Southside High. “Can I ask—Betty never mentions any family—do you still know anyone, have anyone left on the South Side?”

“No, they’re all gone now.”

He reaches an arm halfway across the table then lets it fall. “I’m sorry,” then, catching himself in time, “Alice. I know this is lame, but if there’s anything I can do.”

She smiles at him as she pushes back her chair and stands up. “You know what you can do? You can make good. And rinse that plate before you put it in the dishwasher.” She takes both their mugs to the sink. His is still three quarters full. Jughead’s ears feel hot. She shakes the contents of the little metal ball into the compost bucket beneath the sink, then loads everything into the dishwasher. When she turns back she says, “Liking tea isn’t a pre-requisite for being a Cooper.”

“Noted.”

“Sweet dreams, Jughead.”

“G‘night, Alice.” This time he doesn’t trip over her name.

 

A few minutes later, Betty appears in the doorway Alice has just vacated, her face a mask of sleep and concern. “Juggie? What’s going on? I got up to go to the bathroom and I heard my parents’ door close.”

“Me and your mom were just talking. She fed me lasagna.”

Betty stumbles over and curls up on the chair next to him, her head on his shoulder.

“Here, baby.”  He holds a forkful of food up to her mouth. Once she takes it, she sighs and snuggles deeper into him.

“What’d you guys talk about? Was she nice?”

“Just stuff. I’ll tell you in the morning when you’re not asleep. And yeah, she was.”

He sees her frown in his peripheral vision. “I’m not asleep. I’m just not a night owl like you.”

“Okay, Betts.” But by the time he’s finished eating, she’s fully asleep, making quiet snuffling noises.  He lifts her head off his shoulder and guides her as she melts onto the table. He turns and rinses his plate and fork before placing them in the dishwasher.

Then he lifts her back up and slings one of her arms across his shoulders. “Come on, early bird. Time for bed.” He presses a kiss against her hair, and together they stumble back toward the stairs.

**Author's Note:**

> Alice’s tea blend is based on my own and it’s straight up magic. Catnip is an ingredient, it’s a sedative and it actually tastes really nice.
> 
> Title from "Didn't Leave Nobody But the Baby"


End file.
